Ysra kept the tally of the faces, because she was the only Hand in the Hold who could keep a count of doors and of people at the same time without losing her place in either. She had a slate of her own, the Watch’s slate, with a wooden frame and a chalk that squeaked. She had ruled it into twenty-two squares before the sun was up, and she had written the number twenty-two at the top of the slate in letters that were a finger’s width high, so that anyone who looked at the slate would understand that the count was not finished.
The Mantle made its faces in turns. That was the rule, and Ysra had watched it kept since the first morning, when the dairy-woman had walked up the causeway and been weighed. The body did not make them all at once. It made five, and then it looked at the five and decided whether the five were holding, and then it made the next five, and the first five either stood on the causeway or went back into the weft, and never more than ten stood at one time. She could feel the turns in the stone. Each time a new face came up out of the body’s weight, the causeway gave a little under the soles of her boots, like a plank taking a second traveller, and she counted the give and wrote the number down.
